User-Friendly Reports On Student Test Scores Help Guide Instruction

Pennsylvania officials were expected this week to unveil
the designs for new reports on student and school test performance that
are customized to meet the needs of parents, teachers, and school
leaders, as well as provide a direct link to instruction.

The reports, produced under a four-year, $9.98 million contract with
the Grow Network, a New York City-based company, reflect a growing
recognition that how school data are reported shouldn’t be an
afterthought. Rather, test results provide a crucial opportunity to
communicate with parents, teachers, and others about student
achievement and how it can be improved.

Pennsylvania has taken that message to heart by separating the
contract for test-score reporting from the contract for test
development and administration.

"We’ve been working to improve our assessment system, and we
wanted to link that improved system more directly to curriculum and
instruction," said state Secretary of Education Vicki L. Phillips.

"We actually wanted [the reports] to be a useful tool," she
continued, "and felt that breaking it out and contracting with a group
who sees that as their core mission would be one way to accomplish
that."

In addition to the print component of the Grow reports, an
interactive Web site enables teachers to group students by sets of
skills and to access instructional materials linked to state standards.
Principals can use the Web site to monitor school and classroom
performance. Parents can find suggested reading lists and other tools
for helping their children.

The company’s first contract, in 2001, was to produce reports
for grades 3- 8 for teachers, parents, and administrators in the New
York City public schools. It also generates such reports for the
Chicago schools and, starting this school year, for parents and
teachers in California. And it has won contracts with Nevada, New
Mexico, and New Jersey.

Addressing a Need

David Coleman, the company’s 34-year-old chief executive
officer, conceived the idea for the Grow Network while a senior project
manager at the New York City McKinsey consulting firm. During his five
years there, he did pro bono work for school districts.

"I found, despite widespread discussion of using data to guide
instruction, it was very hard to do so with the tools that principals,
teachers, and parents had available," Mr. Coleman said.

So he gathered an eclectic team of educators, business people, and
technology specialists to build software that turns the results of
standardized tests into a user-friendly, simple-to-read format.

The company, which was founded in 2000, today employs about 70
people and expects to have revenues of $15 million to $20 million this
year. Depending on the scope of the work, most of its contracts run
between $1 million and $3 million annually.

"The thing I say all the time about Grow is that it’s the
first thing that teachers cheered," said David B. Sherman, a vice
president for the United Federation of Teachers in New York City.

"What the Grow Network did was they translated the data into
instructional terms and into practical terms in a very smart way, so it
is as teacher-friendly and as student-friendly as anything of this type
can be," he said.

"The materials from the Grow Network are the first ones—and,
frankly, the only ones to date—that teachers have not only
received warmly, but have found to be very, very valuable," said Mr.
Sherman, whose organization is an American Federation of Teachers
affiliate.

As seen in this sample, the Grow
Network report uses traffic-light colors to show a student’s
achievement level. The student, school, and data in this model are
solely for illustration purposes.

In Pennsylvania, for example, the parent reports include suggestions
for reading and mathematics activities that parents can do at home with
their child, based on his or her test results. They also include useful
suggestions for talking with the child’s teacher and information
about Pennsylvania’s public libraries and other resources.

The reports, for grades 3, 5, 8, and 11, use a traffic- light device
to signal quickly to parents how their children are doing academically.
"Below basic" is colored red, "basic" is yellow, and "advanced" and
"proficient" are green. An arrow points to where the child’s
score falls, with the specific score listed below the graphic.

Inside the reports, each child’s reading and math scores are
broken out by topic, pegged to Pennsylvania’s academic
standards—such as learning to read independently or being able to
do computations without a calculator.

Teachers will receive test results for their incoming classes of
students in the summer, based on tests given the previous spring. Those
reports highlight where a class is likely to need help with
fundamentals, extra instruction and practice, or advanced work.

Each teacher also has an account on Grow Network’s interactive
Web site. With a click, teachers can group pupils based on their
performance on specific topics or other criteria. Another click permits
them to link a student’s needs with a set of instructional
materials and strategies that are themselves linked to state or
district standards. In addition, teachers can pull up a detailed
academic profile for each student.

Pennsylvania also will produce school assessment reports and reports
that help educators and the public understand whether schools have made
"adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind
Act.

"Testing companies don’t focus on the instructional side,"
said Carina Wong, the director of assessment and accountability for the
Pennsylvania education department. "We saw this as an opportunity to
use the reporting to support instruction."

‘Incredibly Useful’

The idea, according to Mr. Coleman, is to make the print materials
and the Web site as easy to use as an automatic teller machine.

"Many states and districts ask us, ‘Will you provide training
on how to read the reports?’ " he said. "Our reply is, ‘If
the reports require training to read, they should be redesigned.’
"

A two- year, $400,000 study, financed by the Carnegie Corporation of
New York and conducted by the Education Development Center, suggests
teachers and principals in the Big Apple are using the reports. While
the nonprofit research center has not finished analyzing all the data,
said Margaret Honey, a vice president at the Newton, Mass.-based EDC
who directed the study, "there was just absolutely no doubt that the
format of the Grow reports was incredibly useful to everyone."

Based on interviews with teachers and principals in 15 New York City
elementary and middle schools and surveys sent to more than 700
educators, researchers found that teachers used the reports in three
ways: to help with planning, including setting class priorities and
doing weekly or monthly lesson planning; to differentiate instruction;
and to converse with parents and others.

Some teachers, for example, printed out all the teaching materials
on the Grow Network’s Web site and then set up a file folder for
each child that contained the student’s Grow report and practice
activities targeted for him or her.

Brian D. Schultz, a 5th grade teacher at the 400-student Richard E.
Byrd Community Academy in Chicago, said he does not support
standardized testing, but he’s found that "Grow provides an
avenue to really help students."

Mr. Schultz, who was previously a performance manager in the
corporate world, uses the Grow information to make individual learning
workbooks for his students. Although he doesn’t attribute the
results to the Grow tools alone, he notes that at the beginning of the
last school year, none of his students tested at or above the national
norms on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, administered in the Chicago
district. After using the customized learning books based on
Grow’s information, 47 percent of his students tested at or above
the national norm in mathematics.

Investment Questioned

A study conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research
provides a more mixed review. "Overall, teachers felt moderately
positive about their experiences with the Grow Network during its first
year of implementation," says the report issued in January by John Q.
Easton and Stuart Luppescu.

The study found that a majority of teachers in grades 4-8 used the
Grow resources, and slightly more than half of respondents found the
various components beneficial. Compared with teachers, elementary
principals in Chicago were "overwhelmingly positive about Grow,"
according to the report.

"Most teachers we talk to really like the way the data are
presented," said Dan Bugler, who oversees accountability, research, and
evaluation for the more than 435,000-student Chicago district. "If
there’s a criticism, it’s that they get the data at the
beginning of the year, but we don’t really have a lot of
benchmark assessments, so they don’t have any data at the midyear
point. So that’s what we’re looking at."

But not everybody thinks the investment in Grow is worthwhile. State
Rep. Christine R. Giunchigliani of Nevada, a Democrat, said she opposed
the $2.8 million contract that her state has signed with the
company.

"I don’t think we need to waste $2.8 million to develop a
brochure to tell people what the test scores are," she argued, noting
that most large school districts have their own internal media
departments that could furnish such information.